LA parishioners have high hopes as next archbishop arrives

by Mitchell Landsberg - May. 29, 2010 12:00 AMLos Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES - Father Paul Griesgraber's parishioners describe him as "old school," a term that is almost laughably open to interpretation, given the 2,000-year history of his particular school, the Roman Catholic Church. In his case, it is used with affection and respect to describe a priest who trusts in the majesty of the Catholic Mass and invests it with deep spirituality in both English and Spanish.

He is also a priest who brings people streaming through the doors of his church, St. Catherine of Siena in Los Angeles' Reseda section, a place that, in many ways, reflects the larger Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Once largely white, St. Catherine's is now mostly Latino. Immigrants have pumped new life into the parish, and Spanish-language Masses draw larger crowds than those in English.

"The church was dead," Olga Calderone, St. Catherine's health director, said bluntly of the time before Griesgraber arrived last summer. "Now we are bringing the cultures together."

It is also what parishioners at St. Catherine's hope the next archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, will bring to an archdiocese that has been battered in recent years by a devastating sexual-abuse crisis even as it has grown to become by far the largest Catholic community in the nation.

Gomez, who arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday, will be officially welcomed to the city Wednesday afternoon with a Mass at the downtown Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. As co-adjutor of the archdiocese, Gomez will work alongside Cardinal Roger Mahony, then succeed him when the prelate retires early next year.

In interviews over the past week, parishioners and staff at St. Catherine's talked about their hopes and concerns for their church as it faces a transition locally and confronts a pernicious threat globally: a scandal of sexual abuse by priests that Pope Benedict XVI recently called "terrifying."

Almost without exception, those interviewed at St. Catherine's said they were pleased with the selection of Gomez, a native of Mexico and a U.S. citizen who has been archbishop of San Antonio since 2004. They had qualified praise for Mahony, who was seen as a compassionate and largely effective archbishop who, many believed, had stumbled in his handling of sexual-abuse cases.

Many expressed confidence, however, that Mahony had enacted appropriate safeguards against future priestly abuse.

What emerged repeatedly from their conversations was a passionate belief in the Catholic Church as an institution, immense satisfaction with the stewardship of their local parish, and a slightly more skeptical view of the greater church hierarchy, both locally and in Rome.

Griesgraber spoke about his efforts to rebuild the parish in the last year, quadrupling the enrollment of the elementary school, adding more Spanish Masses, reopening a vacant convent to house volunteers who teach in the school and otherwise serve the church. And he talked about the transition in leadership in the archdiocese, which Mahony has headed since 1985.

He is aware of "surface chatter" that Gomez might be too conservative for Los Angeles, which has developed a reputation as one of the most progressive archdioceses in the country. Gomez is affiliated with Opus Dei, an organization seen as a conservative force in the global church.

"I listen for it; I listen deeply for it," said Griesgraber. But nothing he has heard from Gomez has set off any alarms. "My guess is that he's a deep person with a deep spirituality" who can't be pigeonholed as conservative or liberal, he said.

But then, Griesgraber said, he himself belongs to two groups of priests, one conservative and one charismatic. He is known for charismatic Masses that bring a sort of Pentecostalism to the church, but he also supports a monthly Latin Mass that appeals to the most conservative Catholics.

What's important, he said, is for the church to get back to basics, to its "legacy of love."

"This is our inheritance," he said. "We have to let that back in."

John Curti, a retired public-school custodian, has been attending St. Catherine's since 1948. He said every archbishop in Los Angeles has been an improvement over the one before; he expects that to continue.

There was near unanimity that it was time for a Latino archbishop, and one who speaks Spanish as a native. Curti noted that when the church dropped an all-Latin Mass in the 1960s, the idea was to adopt "the vernacular language of the people."

"So," he said, "if a parish like this is heavily Hispanic, then the Mass should be in Spanish so these people can understand the word of God in their own language."

Sunday services filled the church this last weekend after a five-hour Pentecost vigil the night before. A late-morning service in English was full; Spanish-language Masses were standing room only.